A few weeks ago I was informed that a DM's forum account had been compromised. After checking IP addresses logged by the forum software and interviewing several players and DMs I had discovered that the players of Swiftar and Darmug had indeed compromised a DM's account and used it to view confidential topics in the DM and Community Council forums. The DM in question has since secured the account with a new password, but the breach these two willingly committed cannot be easily overlooked. In many parts of the world this activity would be considered illegal, and there's legal precedent for it to be prosecuted as identity theft (see
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/08/california-judge-trolling-with-someone-elses-facebook-is-identity-theft.ars). Thus for legal and security reasons, they were both banned immediately.
Additionally, our investigation turned up credible evidence that Swiftar and Darmug disseminated the confidential information they had read to several members of the playerbase. This is another problem that created a toxic atmosphere, poisoning the community we've taken years to build. This, also, could not be overlooked.
The combination of both actions made for an unforgivable offense. Neither Swiftar nor Darmug will ever be allowed back into this community after this. Furthermore, it has also come to my attention that Swiftar has been accusing various members of this community of "selling him out" and asking players he knows to harass these people he believes have "snitched" on him. Let me make this explicitly clear: we won't tolerate people harassing or in any way bullying people who've helped us in discovering this. There are
two people who did something very wrong here - there's no excuses for what they did and no one but them is to blame for it.
In all the years we've been open, we've had a lot of negative instances rear their ugly heads, but I can say without exaggeration that this is the
worst thing that has ever happened here. But I have faith and hope that our community is strong enough to overcome even this situation, and we will all be better for it.
Thank you for your time and for playing here.
Sincerely,
DM Blue, on behalf of the PotM DM team.
